The State Academy of Artistic Sciences versus Petrograd formalism: Verse theory. II. On Zhirmunsky’s “Rhyme, its history and theory”

Abstract

The article presents a historical and scientific analysis of the oral presentations and other works that criticized Boris Eikhenbaum’s “Melodics of Verse” and Viktor Zhirmunsky’s “Rhyme, Its History and Theory” from the perspective of Moscow formalism. The overview relies on unknown materials, which can thus be introduced into scholarly discourse. It refers to the presentations made by the philologist and philosopher Maksim Kœnigsberg and the literary scholar Mikhail Shtokmar, a student of Boris Yarkho at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences. In addition, the data from the newly discovered article by Maxim Kœnigsberg, “Compound Rhymes in the Lyrics of Innokentii Annenskii” (1924), is explored. The theses of Kœnigsberg’s exposé are published for the first time, with notes. The aim of the article is to reveal the polemical layer in the works of Moscow formalists. This is achieved by identifying key positions in the analysed texts, by their historical commentary, mutual comparison, and the discovery of authors’ logic. The results of the research include the publication of archival materials and their interpretation in the context of internal formalistic polemics. New materi­als reveal that Zhirmunsky allowed Kœnigsberg to develop his own theory of verse with an orientation towards semantics; whereas Shtokmar, on the contrary, rejected an important part in Zhirmunsky’s rhyme theory. The interrelation between different branches of the Russian formalism become clearer.

Keywords

• russian formalism
• gakhn
• mlk
• theory of verse
• kœnigsberg
• zhirmunsky
• shtokmar